September 24, 2006
The Week of the Angels
This week, on September 29th, we celebrate the feast of the Archangels, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. The following Monday, October 2nd, we celebrate the Guardian Angels. Years ago we gave much thought to our angels based on the words of Our Lord that the angels of children behold the face of the Heavenly Father. We all had a devotion to our guardian angel, and we were especially familiar with praying to Saint Michael because of the prayer to him said after every Mass.
In recent years the interest in angels has strangely moved from Catholics to people of other religious affiliations. About two or three years ago the book stores were swamped with books about angels, almost none of them written by Catholics. Many included interesting accounts of people being helped by figures that seemed to be angels or unknown strangers who appeared out of the blue, assisted them, and went on. There were a couple of women stranded in the snow who maintained that an unknown stranger had appeared, got them out of the snow, and then disappeared. There was a great deal of popular interest in angels, almost none of it informed by Catholic theology.
Now the bubble has broken and you don’t hear much about angels anymore, but this week might be a time for us to recall our own relationship with our guardian angel, who is given to us for our life, and also the Archangels, particularly Michael, the great defender of souls. Prayers to angels go way back to the Old Testament, when the appearance of angels, also called Sons of God, was fairly common. We have, in the life of Our Lord, the Angels of the Nativity, the Angels of the Temptation, and the Angel of the Agony. The modern skeptics will laugh at these things, but they were not there in the first place. Some of them are so skeptical that if their own angel appeared to them, they wouldn’t know who it was.
For myself, I am very happy to have the friendship of angels. I pray every day to my guardian angel and to Saint Michael, and in a general way to all the angels. It can’t hurt, and as it has been said so often in modern times, we can get by with a little help from our friends. It can be both fascinating and edifying to think of your angel and to pray to this person. Angels actually are neither male nor female; although we often call them “he” and yet depict them as rather feminine figures. Perhaps the best picture of an angel I’ve ever seen is the one in the Annunciation by America’s first great black artist, Henry Tanner. The angel is seen as a living shaft of light. When I saw the picture the first time I said, “now that’s what an angel is like.” Think about it. Do you pray to this other person (angels are persons) and ask this person to help you with the tasks of life and to protect you and to be there when you come before the judgment seat of God. It can’t hurt.
Fr. Benedict Groeschel, CFR
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